A thorough recovery from the recession will require state legislators to plan further than short-term stopgap spending, newly appointed Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce president Kelly Brough told a gathering of business and civic leaders Tuesday.

Innovations in education, addressing child poverty and protecting small and medium-size businesses are some of the tougher — but worthwhile — tasks Colorado legislators should take on when they reconvene in January, Brough told the City Club of Denver.

With a $1 billion state structural deficit, “we must begin rethinking everything about what we do and how we do it,” Brough said. “The reality is that the coming budget year may be the most difficult the state of Colorado has ever faced.”

Though economists say Colorado is well-positioned to solve some of its short-term issues, Brough said it’s the longer-term ones that will have the greatest impact if not planned for now.

Though Colorado struggles financially to maintain roads and bridges and to build a transit system that will attract additional businesses, she said it is more entrepreneurial than any other state in the nation.

By example, Brough noted how Colorado has the nation’s highest ACT/SAT scores yet drops to 29th for the number of high school students it graduates.

“We must work together to create a financial structure in this state that is sustainable,” Brough told the 40 businesspeople at the Brown Palace luncheon.

“We would be shirking our responsibility if we didn’t look down the road several years,” he said.

Proposals that would expand the state’s Rainy Day Fund to bolster the budget, allow higher education more flexibility to do its job, and expand the creation of public and private partnerships are expected to be brought before legislators in January, Carroll said.

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.